Mandy: The Unauthorised Biography of Peter Mandelson by Paul Routledge Simon & Schuster 302pp, £17.99 in UK
Is there any possibility, before the thing gets completely out of hand, of stopping people from writing biographies of politicians who are barely out of short pants? Peter Mandelson is fortyfive. He has been in public life for only seven years, since his election to the Commons in 1992. Granted, he has done a lot in seven years, but it is hardly earthshattering stuff. In any list of biographies waiting to be written, his would, on any objective criteria, be closer to the bottom than the top. Why then the interest, why the hype?
It can hardly be his homosexuality (although there are six index references to this, as compared with three for his childhood). As Routledge makes clear, this was publicly referred to first in a book by his friend Bryan Gould, just before the 1987 general election. During that election, details of his sexual orientation and domestic arrangements were splashed all over the News of the World. Twelve years later, it is news mainly to those with short memories or over-active imaginations. Its only possible relevance to his political life is that, because the demands of his domestic life have been slight, relative to those which affect politicians with young families, he has had time - more time than is good for him, I suspect - to engage in conspiracies, chatter and careerism.
The real reason, I suspect, is not difficult to find. There are probably two: because Mandelson is fascinated by the media; and because the media are fascinated by Mandelson. The mutually cannibalistic relationship between politics and journalism has been an observable fact of life forever, more or less. Its more absurd manifestations can at least be used to wrap a fish supper in afterwards. But hard covers? And three hundred pages? Give us a break.
Journalism is a peculiar profession in that it contains so many people who like to boast of their failures. At the core of the fuss about Mandelson is the belief that he is the arch-manipulator of the media, and this is why he is both demonised and hyped. The irony is that he is frequently accused of taking liberties with the democratic system by journalists who fail to recognise that by accusing him of being a successful media manipulator they are effectively pleading guilty of being manipulated, of being not up to the job. Most of the manipulation here, however, strikes me as fairly runof-the mill stuff. Routledge's breathless disclosure of the first occasion on which Mandelson tried to influence the content of a television programme might go down well in some Fleet Street pub but for most sophisticated observers it's a bit of a yawn. Some of the more credulous or eager-tohelp journalists don't come too well out of it, but this is hardly the stuff of classic biography either.
Media manipulation apart, Mandelson comes across basically as a highly ambitious, not particularly likeable politician who had some insights, has made some mistakes, and looks likely to make more. He realised that Labour would never win an election unless it abandoned its habit of insulting or ignoring the intelligence of the electorate, but he was not alone in this, and it is altogether possible that by 1997 the British electorate was so tired of the Tories that they would have put in Labour anyway. He may yet live to thank his stars that his forced resignation saved him from self-immolation on that ghastly funeral pyre for any political reputation, the Millennium Dome. He may also in time acquire the experience that, combined with his ability, will make him someone about whom a biography should be written. When he has, he will stop wittering on about plebiscites, focus groups, lobbies, "citizens' movements", and the like. He may have put his finger on the crisis of participation, and ultimately of legitimacy, which is growing in many liberal democratic societies, but it will not be solved by bombarding the electorate with multiple-choice questions to be answered by pressing touch-sensitive screens on the Internet.
All this, however, begs one other major question, and it is not one that this book seriously addresses: the exact parameters of his political relationship with Tony Blair. This is a question, perhaps, that only a major biography of Blair will be able to answer. And it's too early for that, too.
John Horgan is the author of biographies of Sean Lemass and Mary Robinson; he teaches at Dublin City University